When I was, I believe, 11 years old, I wrote an email to Sega's official customer service address proclaiming my undying love to their company and expressing how I couldn't wait to see the still officially unannounced next-generation console they were cooking up. At the time, I'd assumed it would be...

While not actually from a video game, Saori Kobayashi's standalone album "Terra Magica" sounds like the offical soundtrack to a Panzer Dragoon game that never was. Kobayashi composed the music for Panzer Dragoons Saga and Orta as well as 2013's Crimson Dragon, Panzer Dragoon's ultimately disappointi...

E3 2006 felt like such a magical time. The Xbox 360 wasn't even a year old, and the PS3 and Wii just a few months away. I, like so many other Final Fantasy fans, was eager to see what this new generation of hardware would mean for the next entry in the series, and a trailer was all but assured for t...

Metal Gear Solid is one of my absolute most favorite series, and I rank MGS 3 as one of the most personally important games I've ever played. I have purchased entire consoles just to play the latest Metal Gear games: first the PSP for Portable Ops, which was touted as the first full-canon spinoff in...

I have purchased Final Fantasy XII four times. I literally just sat down to write this after having unwrapped a new copy of the Switch port of the game and booting it up for the first time. As excited as I was to start a new adventure in Ivalice, I was moved to write down my thoughts about why I lov...

Genesis player checking in here. As a kid, we rented a copy of Aladdin over one weekend, and I remember being struck by how great the game looked and just how well it--at least to my younger sensibilities and imagination--captured the look and feel of the motion picture, which was a favorite in our ...

Despite never having owned an SNES or PlayStation, I was a full-fledged fan of the series by the time Final Fantasy X was being prepped for launch thanks to the PC ports of FF 7 and 8. After years as a diehard Sega fan, I'd been liberated from console tribalism with the announcement that Sega was dr...

I'll remember Final Fantasy VIII launched on September 9, 1999 in the U.S. because it was the same day the Sega Dreamcast launched. A lifetime Sega fanboy, I had my sights firmly set on their new console, and Square's latest entry was barely a blip on my radar. Well, that is, until I saw the intro c...

The Quest for Glory series of classic Sierra adventure games is one of my all-time favorites despite the fact that the first game launched when I was just three years old. Lori and Corey Cole, the married couple who led development on the series, combined the adventure game formula Sierra establishe...

I felt the impact of Final Fantasy VII's existence long before I ever actually got to play it. As a kid, my dad and I would sometimes while away the time by browsing the Media Play (a now-defunct chain of retail stores here in the states) down the street. We typically didn't plan to buy anything, bu...

I was a pre-teen when Resident Evils 1 and 2 launched and shamefully afraid of the series. I can remember a classmate in the sixth grade wearing a shirt emblazoned with the infamous face of the series' very first zombie, and when she asked if I'd played the game, I recall vainly attempting to hide m...

In June 2001, I was working my first-ever job as a games attendant at a local amusement park. I was 15 years old, finally earning some disposable income of my own, and still reeling from the untimely demise of the Sega Dreamcast. Until this point in time, I had only ever owned PC and SEGA gaming har...

Hearts of Stone begins with a seemingly rote witcher contract in which the player is tasked with slaying an amphibian monster dwelling in the sewers below Oxenfurt. As you work your way into the beast's lair--joined by none other than Shani from the first Witcher (and the book series)--you come acro...

One of the joys I've had with Sonic Mania is really introducing my wife to the series. Like Stanshall was saying with their own Sonic history, she had this idea that Sonic was all about holding the joystick/d-pad down to the right and allowing Sonic to just speed towards the finish line. She'd even ...

Somewhere between the release of Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy XIII, I set out on a personal quest to collect and play all of the mainline Final Fantasy games minus the sole MMORPG entry at the time, FFXI. I had already finished and adored Final Fantasies 7-12 (again, with the exception of 11)...

I was eight years old the first time I played Mortal Kombat. I was spending the night at a friend's house, and he and his brother were big fans of the series. Until that night, I had only ever seen the game in arcades, and only ever out of the corner of my eye. I was not a sheltered child, but I was...

_eO_pqzP4EI Lands of Lore 3 is not a good game. It's a disappointing conclusion to a classic series and a game that was showing its age well before it ever hit store shelves. The story is unsatisfying, the RPG mechanics are often broken, and its characters don't even move their darn lips when they ...

Near the end of Act Two of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, you arrive upon the Isle of Mists where at last the search for Geralt's surrogate daughter, a plot arc that has dominated the game's main story up until this point, will come to its conclusion. After a run-in with seven dwarves--themselves caric...